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Isnt downdetector just people reporting its down though? Its useful for sure but not actually hooking into any officialy API or anything. Great for when the sta

Isnt downdetector just people reporting its down though? Its useful for sure but not actually hooking into any officialy API or anything. Great for when the status page also goes down but surely a lag time

hinkley 16d ago
I go to status pages to find out if 1) I’m crazy, 2) if our IT fucked up DNS. Every service I’ve ever paid for or someone paid for on my behalf has gaslit me about their status page because it’s impolitic and bad for sales to update the page before you know what’s going on, just because some users are reporting issues. So a third party doesn’t have to deal with VPs kneecapping the engineers’ access to the status page. Or some services can’t update the status page when the site is hard down because they are so obsessed with keeping it up that they have no mitigations when they are down. I was the one at my biggest gig that had to push to get static 404 and 500 pages uploaded to S3 so we could show something for vanity URLs even if customer ID lookup was down. And then a customer noticed they hadn’t updated since they changed their contact info and I found the job was timing out without an alert or deployment failure for five months. Five. Months. The guy who wrote it had quit, and he didn’t follow my advice on copying a batch job I’d poured way too much effort into. The damned thing was timing out after 50 minutes. I followed my own advice and got it to 4.5 minutes. Almost all of that time delta was waiting for fanout calls, which were pounding the shit out of consumer facing services. 90% of the calls he was making didn’t need to be made.
fmbb 15d ago
No lag time for popular services. Always faster than e.g. GitHub’s or Chat GPT’s status pages.
- Melatonic 15d ago
  Do they do alerts ? Been also using UpDog (based on DataDog) which actually has been quite good. They have a single status page for many services who integrate their products

hinkley 16d ago

I go to status pages to find out if 1) I’m crazy, 2) if our IT fucked up DNS. Every service I’ve ever paid for or someone paid for on my behalf has gaslit me about their status page because it’s impolitic and bad for sales to update the page before you know what’s going on, just because some users are reporting issues. So a third party doesn’t have to deal with VPs kneecapping the engineers’ access to the status page. Or some services can’t update the status page when the site is hard down because they are so obsessed with keeping it up that they have no mitigations when they are down. I was the one at my biggest gig that had to push to get static 404 and 500 pages uploaded to S3 so we could show something for vanity URLs even if customer ID lookup was down. And then a customer noticed they hadn’t updated since they changed their contact info and I found the job was timing out without an alert or deployment failure for five months. Five. Months. The guy who wrote it had quit, and he didn’t follow my advice on copying a batch job I’d poured way too much effort into. The damned thing was timing out after 50 minutes. I followed my own advice and got it to 4.5 minutes. Almost all of that time delta was waiting for fanout calls, which were pounding the shit out of consumer facing services. 90% of the calls he was making didn’t need to be made.

fmbb 15d ago

No lag time for popular services. Always faster than e.g. GitHub’s or Chat GPT’s status pages.

Melatonic 15d ago
Do they do alerts ? Been also using UpDog (based on DataDog) which actually has been quite good. They have a single status page for many services who integrate their products